The agrarian question in the mirror of the discussions in the pre-revolutionary historiography

The abolition of serfdom in the middle of the XIX century put the agrarian question into the first place for the thinking Russian intellectuals. The consequences of the Great Reforms for community development, peasant land tenure and land tenure, land ownership, the economy of the agrarian sector, the economic initiative of the population, the growth of agricultural production, the management and self-management of peasant societies, the adaptation of the peasant economy to the changing market conditions, socio-cultural changes caused by modernization processes, socio-economic contradictions both between individual categories of the peasantry and among peasants and representatives of other social groups - all these surveys were actively discussed by the Russian public at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The «specifically sociological» components of the agrarian question were transformed into an analysis of the role and significance of the peasant community for the development of the country, and this topic was undoubtedly of a political nature, and the polemics around it was extremely rich. Economists, historians, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, travelers, figures of Zemstvo, publicists, officials, politicians, revolutionaries, representatives of all social strata of Russian society wrote about the agrarian question and the ways of its solution.